FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system.

Welcome to FreeDOS

FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project.

These days, there are three main uses for FreeDOS:

  1. Running classic DOS games
  2. Running business software that only supports DOS
  3. Supporting embedded DOS systems, such as a computerized cash register or till

FreeDOS should run on any standard PC, but if you are new to DOS, we recommend you use a PC emulator to install and boot FreeDOS. You can find PC emulators for all computer platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac.) You can even run FreeDOS using a PC emulator written in Java, right in your web browser!

FreeDOS is open source software; you can view and edit our source code. Most FreeDOS programs are distributed under the GNU General Public License ("GNU GPL"). Because we are open source / Free software, FreeDOS would not exist were it not for all the people who contribute to it. Even if you don't write code, you can help out the FreeDOS Project by submitting comments and bug reports.

We welcome new users to FreeDOS. You can contribute to the FreeDOS Project by downloading our latest release and telling us what you think. We have a bug tracking system that helps you report problems and submit requests, and otherwise tell us how to improve FreeDOS. By participating in the development and debugging process, you help everyone.

Now is a great time to get involved in FreeDOS - we are starting to plan the FreeDOS 1.1 distribution! You can help out by looking at the FreeDOS Software List and contributing patches. We also need help with testing, especially as we get closer to making a pre-release.

For FreeDOS 1.1, we aren't planning any major changes. This will pretty much be an update to the 1.0 release, but with a new Update program, an optional floppy-only "Base" install, and (hopefully) a few updates to the Install program. Let's worry about other, larger changes in later releases.

Latest News

New maintainer for TRCH
2008-09-08 00:46 - Jim Hall
Alexis Malozemoff recently volunteered to be the new maintainer for TRCH, and since I think I've taken the program about as far as I'm going to, I have agreed that Alexis is the new maintainer. You can always grab the most up-to-date copy from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/trch/
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Updated getopt
2008-09-06 15:52 - Jim Hall
Alex Malozemoff and I have been discussing the UNIX-like getopt that we have at ibiblio. There's a bug where you cannot turn off the error messages (opterr was being ignored.) I have patched getopt to fix this. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/libs/getopt/unix-like/
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FreeDOS EDIT 0.9a (FD-Dflat+ based)
2008-09-06 15:45 - Jim Hall
Aitor wrote: "I hereby announce FreeDOS EDIT 0.9a (the sucessor of EDIT 0.7d). The big change about the 0.9 series is that it is now based on FreeDOS DFlat+, which is a user interface development toolkit, that has actually been excerpted (and continued) from EDIT. Thus, if you ever happen to see another DFlat+ -based application, you should expect to see a similar usability and look and feel. The list of changes is huge, although most are internal and do not reflect in functionality. However, I may have introduced several new bugs, so please, let me know if you find them." http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/edit/ edit09ax.zip
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DFlat+ User Interface development kit
2008-09-06 15:32 - Jim Hall
Aitor writes: "I announce my new project, FreeDOS DFlat +, as a set of libraries for easily designing text-mode user interfaces based on windowing and messaging, which has been excerpted out of FreeDOS EDIT 0.7d, in order to be used by other developers to create their text-mode user interface with windows, menus and mouse. The libraries in FreeDOS EDIT como from Dr. Dobb's D-FLAT, hence the name of "DFlat +", as I plan to continue development and bug fixing. I have currently released the version 1.0.0 of the libraries." http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/libs/dflat/
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Heretic and Hexen Sources Re-released Under the GPL
2008-09-06 15:25 - Jim Hall
In a surprise email from Raven Software employee James Monroe, James "Quasar" Haley of Team Eternity has been notified that the source code for Heretic and Hexen has been re-released under the GNU General Public License, and is now available from Sourceforge. w00t! http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=238655
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(Updated) TRCH 3.1f
2008-09-02 19:18 - Jim Hall
TRCH translate characters, like UNIX linefeeds to DOS CR/LF pairs. You can use TRCH to convert Mac files to DOS, DOS files to UNIX, etc. Joerg Jenderek has updated the German NLS file in TRCH, so now I have released a minor update: version 3.1d. I also reorganized some files in the zip file to better meet the FreeDOS directory standard, but no program (code) changes. ** UPDATE: I've also released version 3.1e, which uses a UPX'd binary, adds an Esperanto translation (thanks, Rugxulo!) and includes the full Cats 3.97 source code (which is a dependency anyway.) ** UPDATE: New version 3.1f is out, with Polish and French translations contributed by Mateusz Viste. (Rugxulo sent me a silly Pig-Latin translation, so I put that in there, too.) You can download the latest version at http://www.freedos.org/jhall/ - or more directly from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/trch/ trch31f.zip
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JWASM 1.91
2008-09-01 20:07 - Jim Hall
Japheth writes: "Hi, an update for JWasm was necessary, now v1.91 is current. The update is strongly recommended, v1.9 contains a pretty nasty bug in 16bit code generation, bad code might be generated without warning. Besides bugfixes, there's one improvement: the /bin switch allows to create raw binaries, no link step is needed." Download from http://www.japheth.de/JWasm.html
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NASM - Netwide Assembler
2008-08-17 21:07 - Jim Hall
The latest stable version of NASM is 2.03.01 - released back in June (sorry, I'm late in posting about it.) NASM was originally developed by Simon Tatham and Julian Hall, and is now maintained by a team led by H. Peter Anvin. The NASM team are actively looking for more developers. In particular, they really need a maintainer for the MacOS X (Mach-O) backend! Please volunteer to help at http://nasm.sourceforge.net/
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New 4DOS (Version 7.74)
2008-08-17 21:03 - Jim Hall
It's been really encouraging to see such rapid development continue on 4DOS. This has probably been my most favorite DOS application. Version 7.74 was released a few days ago. New in this release: # History log no longer contains the line "AUTOEXEC" # Added @FILEREADB function # If length = –1, @FILEWRITEB input data is series of ASCII values # Updated help file for the above changes. Also, please update your bookmarks with the new URL - http://4dos.zzl.org/
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DUGL 1.12 (DOS Ultimate Game Library)
2008-08-17 20:53 - Jim Hall
The DOS Ultimate Game Library released 1.12 on 9 August. New in this version: - Added to Poly16 the support of POLY16_TEXT_BLND and POLY16_MASK_TEXT_BLND allowing to draw a texture mapped poly blended with a color with 32 level of blending. Allowing flat lightening, fog, shineness ... - Fixed a bug with POLY16_MASK_TEXT which was not always masked. - Added ConvSurf8ToSurf16Pal allowing to direct convert a 8bpp surf to a 16bpp without a lookup table. - Added full support for uncompressed BMP format with : LoadMemBMP, LoadBMP, SaveMemBMP, SaveBMP, SizeSaveBMP, LoadMemBMP16, LoadBMP16, SaveMemBMP16, SaveBMP16 and SizeSaveBMP16. More examples and maybe a small (silent) game will be released soon :-) http://dugl.50webs.com/
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